Harvard Univ. and $200 is to much for the student version? Ok...but in a photo class you would prolly be better served teaching Lightroom which is $99 for the student version or even Elements which is less (price varies a lot).

P.S. you do know this is a User to User Forum right? You aren't talking to Adobe here.

Interesting that you feel a student Photoshop license is too expensive.

I'll bet they blow $200 on one night out with the girlfriend or boyfriend, on gas to drive home to see their parents, on a couple of months of cell phone plan... Out of curiosity, what does a typical printed textbook cost a student nowadays?

Does teaching them "Gimp" have much real-world use? Anyone serious about imaging is using Photoshop.

Have you considered Photoshop Elements (I see Jeff has asked this also)?

I know. I sent my son back to university for the winter semester with $1,000 for books. He called to say just one book for one engineering course, was $250, so please send more money. And he's taking six courses.

What is your definition of 'real-world'? In just the past week there have been a half million downloads of GIMP from sourceforge.net (just one of the many sources for GIMP). The numbers seem to indicate that people in the real world find value in GIMP as an image editor.

A good teacher does not teach software. They teach concepts that work in any software. GIMP isn't really so different.

Last time I looked at The Gimp, admittedly a year or two ago, all I saw was a bug-ridden toy that barely worked. I'm sorry to be blunt, and maybe my information is dated, but it was worth exactly what it cost (less when you consider time I wasted futzing around with it to get it to work). Should Harvard be teaching people to use junkware?

But you make a good point - why not just teach fundamentals, and advise the students to get Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paintshop, IrfanView, or Gimp - whatever their budget allows. Show examples using Photoshop and assume the bright young minds would easily be able to translate to whatever else. I should hope they can do that, or the world is in for REAL trouble.

The download page for RawTherapee shows downloads for 10.6, just as Photoshop shows system requirements for 10.5/10.6. That does not necessarily mean that these programs do not work in later versions of the OS.

I also use DarkTable on Linux but it looks like you might run it on OS X as well:

You are probably right that Elements might work, on the other hand, now that I have discovered GIMP I may just use that.

Again, if you are teaching a photo course as apposed to a digital imaging course, then I think you need to look at Lightroom. It's a photo based imaging application that is designed for photographers not graphic artists. The student version is $99 and it has a 30 day demo.

Here in NY most community colleges have Photoshop available in at least some of the on campus computer labs.

Regardless, if you're going to have the students shoot RAW and you want to go open source, I'd suggest taking a look at RawTherapee. Truth has a date stamp - just because someone says it won't work on a given platform doesn't mean that is still the case even as of the latest compile.

Having said that, I just bought Photoshop and with the exception of not yet knowing how (if?) to spot white balance an image, I'm doing raw processing just about as quickly and, sad for this open source aficianado to say, getting better results out of my crappy photography skills (only had a dSLR for 2 months now) with ACR / Ps than I was with RawTherapee.

Have you checked out the curriculum thingees that Adobe has in their educational resources area? Might be some neat ideas for assignments.